Themes
Some interpretations of the narrative hold Don's journey to be a metaphor for his life, played out in stages from youth to death. According to this view, the narrative reveals a downward spiral into the reality of a lonely life and love lost. This journey is played out in chronological order through each of his five past lovers.
1st Lover: Lolita is the shadow of what was once Sharon Stone's character, Laura. Lolita represents his early stage of life where sexual energy and wanton passion drives his forming of relationships. Youthful feminine beauty, the prospect of easy titillating adventures, propel his search for meaningless sexual liaisons. This leads him down a path in life as a Don Juan.
2nd lover: The once great passions of youth that could have been lovers forever are now lost memories in a life that has becoming sterile, asset-building, and functional. The loss of his first and most fond love has been settled for second best in a sad quest to avoid loneliness.
3rd lover: Dr. Carmen is the denunciation of traditional love to seek desperate refuge in our own idiosyncratic peculiar insanities to the extreme of forming relationships with the absurd and the rejection of being hurt too many times, accepting that love can only be found in dependable objects and in being cynical of what once was.
4th Lover: Penny represents all the cold brutality that life hits you with in old age, the impossibility of forming new meaningful relationships when you are old. The ugly cruelty of age hits him hard; he is alone.
Interlude of Flower Shop Girl: She is his caring nurse, almost a reflection on a retirement home, only caring for him out of pity. She nurses him through to death.
5th Lover: She is death. In the graveyard, he laments alone and cries.
It is only at the end of his journey, on finding death, that he is sad. Furthermore, it is only when he thinks he has found his son does he realize that he is truly lonely.
Read more about this topic: Broken Flowers
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)